Canterbury Tales (General Prologue) by Geoffrey Chaucer
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What are the origins of talent shows in the 1380s?
John, do you look well at here, da? What was your nichter like?
My nichter, Sophie, was most forsooth and troublesome. Our cat, Emily, got stuck on the neighbour's roof until the guards came and brought her down again, but she fell.
My God, that is a tale of sentence and solace. Thank you very much. Are you wearing a pair of underpants on your head?
OK, we will we will back up and explain. We are doing the accent for anyone listening who's wondering what it is, is, of course, Chaucer voice, because we are finally doing Chaucer and we get to flex our Chaucer muscles, don't we?
Yeah, I can't wait. Well, we're in. We're doing it. And for those who are not watching this on some video format, Jonty is wearing a black hood, the garment of the medieval scholar. Jonty, what is your black hood made from?
I look very much like the picture of Chaucer that anyone can find.
In the Ellesmere manuscript.
Unfortunately, I don't have a medieval hood at hand, so I'm afraid I am wearing on my head a very clean, I want to emphasise the word clean before I say anything else, a very clean pair of pants, underwear for Australian parlours. Yeah, they look great. What is your nun's habit made from?
Yes, it's a tea towel that I stole from the ski resort where we stayed in Italy last year.
Oh, wow. So you're confessing to blasphemy and theft in one sentence.
Yeah. Larceny and blasphemy. I need to go on a pilgrimage.
Yeah. Well, Sophie, now is the day.
I've come to the right place.
You'll come to the right place because let's ramp this up. This is The Secret Life of Books. I am Jonty Claypole, corrupt man of the cloth, going on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, hoping to weasel a few coins out of my fellow travellers along the way to fill my deep pockets.
And I'm Sophie Gee, a.k.a. Madame Eglantine, and I am a prioress with impeccable table manners, a dainty and a worldly. I'm much more like a lady of the court than I am like a medieval nun. I have a beautiful singing voice. I speak in Franglais, in fake French, and I love all animals. And this week, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales.
Reality talent shows like The X Factor and Got Talent and its many spinoffs began in the 1380s, if not earlier. You thought I was going to say the 1980s, the 1380s. And they were invented by the celebrated entertainment impresario Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote his medieval masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, at the end of a long career. The Canterbury Tales are one of the most famous works of English literature ever and still a pretty compulsory staple in university English degrees. Oh, how I treasure the months. I think it was a year I spent studying the Canterbury Tales or Chaucer in general.
Yes, quite right.
They've been endlessly adapted and translated, but most people would be hard pressed to say what they're about, whether the tales are poetry or prose, fiction or nonfiction, and what Canterbury has to do with the whole story. In this first installment of a series on longer poems in the English language, Secret Life of Books is coming to the rescue once again, Sophie. It's just what we do.
Hmm.
We're explaining what the Canterbury Tales are, why they remain literary staples, what makes their characters so memorable, and what we can know about the book as a whole from the brilliant long poem that begins the cycle, known, not very excitingly, but it's how it's known, as the general prologue. I mean, I can't see Hollywood buying up that title as a franchise.
No, they'd have to do a retitle these days. So the Canterbury Tales are fiction. They're the imaginary story of a religious pilgrimage that sets out from a pub in London, the Tabard Inn in Southwark, to be exact, and ends in Canterbury Cathedral. At the beginning of the story, the pilgrims who are going on the trip meet up in this pub and the innkeeper, whose name is Harry Bailey, says that they're going to occupy themselves on the long walk ahead with a storytelling competition. That's where Got Talent comes in. Each pilgrim is going to tell two stories on the way out and two on the way back.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What are the origins of talent shows in the 1380s?
0:03–14:44
2
How does Chaucer's Canterbury Tales redefine storytelling?
14:44–25:47
3
How does Chaucer's choice of language impact the tales?
25:47–32:36
4
What social commentary is present in the characters of the Canterbury Tales?
32:36–33:54
5
What is the significance of the General Prologue in the Canterbury Tales?
33:54–49:16
6
How does the character of the Knight reflect medieval values?
49:16–1:22:04